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Data Quest Article, 04/2010, Ganesh Natarajan
 
 
The accolades and personal reminiscences that flooded the e-mail circuits and the newspapers at the demise of CK Prahlad reminded me of the untimely passing of Dewang Mehta a decade ago. Every person who spoke of CK remembered him for some personal touch that defined the man, so much so that each seemed to believe that he enjoyed a special one to one relationship with the great man. My own favourite recollection is sitting across from him and chatting in the wee hours of the morning waiting for a long British Airways flight to land in Mumbai. I had asked him then how he managed to do so many long haul flights in his teaching, advisory and consulting commitments across borders. At that time he had just smiled but when I caught him at a Bangalore TiE event some years later to request him to do the valedictory session at the annual Nasscom Leadership forum in 2009, he looked at me quizzically and said “And I thought you disapproved of all my travels !”
In many ways, his love for India and willingness to literally travel the extra mile to participate in high impact initiatives was typical of CK. Look at the number of initiatives in this decade which have his imprint – the TiE movement which he treated as his own, the India at 75 report published by CII and Young Indians which has his visionary thinking embodied in every suggestion and action and of course his interactions with NASSCOM, with many of us as individual CEOs and collectively in a scintillating workshop he did over a decade ago – each intervention bore the stamp of excellence.
His contributions to management and leadership thinking have been truly significant. In my early days of trying to lead a laggard in computer training APTECH towards a race for the top slot, I remember being greatly influenced by his seminal work with Gary Hamel “Competing for the future” where he argued the virtues of looking at opportunity share rather than just market share. If young entrepreneurs starting and running emerging companies would only take a leaf from his book and build world beating companies in Information Security, Cloud Computing, Mobile Gaming and a host of emerging opportunity areas rather than trying to chip away at the market share of dominant incumbents in Application Development and ERP implementations.
His lectures and writings on Innovation are still being digested by business leaders and students around the world and another path breaking work on discovering wealth at the bottom of the pyramid has opened new doors for business success in hitherto undiscovered and unexploited parts of the country. The success of many Micro Finance startups today and the renewed interest in finding solutions for small and medium businesses in every corner of the country and many developing countries around the world owe a lot to the research of leading thinkers like CK. As India comes out of an eighteen month slowdown and business and economic fortunes improve (the recent slew of positive news from the IT sector is symptomatic of a quick recovery), all firms whether focused on domestic or exports markets would do well to read some of his books and look for new ideas, new plans and quite simply, different ways of thinking and exploiting business opportunities that will abound in the years to come. Somebody rightly said the day after he died that of there were a Nobel Prize given for outstanding management and business thinking, CK Prahlad would surely be the most deserving recipient. There are many more academicians we are all proud of and it is heartening to find so many thinkers assuming leadership roles, not just in the corporate sector but leading technology and business schools in the Western world but CK will long be remembered as one of our path breaking success stories.
A final thought on CK Prahlad as one great chapter in Indian academic brilliance comes to an end. Some people meeting him for the first time would be a little disconcerted at his brusque response to long winded comments and questions. Like every intelligent and articulate professional leader and I can think of quite a few great Indian IT CEOs who would fall into the same category, CK did not tolerate mediocrity in any form and would prefer to cut an irrelevant conversation short and move on to more meaningful things. With many of us trying to do too much in too little time, this may be one more lesson that should be learnt to expand the effectiveness and success of individuals and firms in our industry!
   
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